The Spirit Wood

by Robert Masello

  “You don't like it?”

  Was he really baiting her? Or was he just simple-minded, as she'd thought at first? She wasn't sure what tone to take with him.

  “As a matter of fact, I don't like it,” she said, then added offhandedly, just in case he was baiting her, “but it doesn't matter either way.” She was damned if she was going to give him any satisfaction.

  “I've got to go in now,” she said and walked away, leaving him standing at the lip of the fountain. She'd have to remember, in future, to keep the door to her studio closed.

  Inside, the house was as silent as a tomb—and a tomb was what the cold marble surfaces continued to remind her of. Peter had turned the little library off their bedroom into a close facsimile of his old office in Wyatt Hall, with the same stacks of books, the same colored folders, the same Smith-Corona with the same unreliable margin release. Every morning, after the three of them had had some breakfast, usually just coffee and a piece of fruit or toast, Peter retired to the library and Byron to his room; the first time Meg had looked in on Byron, she'd been startled by the white bedsheet he'd thrown over the bureau mirror. “Though he's not exactly in my field,” Byron remarked, “Keats said it was best to write when looking at a blank white wall. This was the best I could do.”

  “But doesn't it give you the creeps at night?” Meg asked.

  “Nope. I sleep like a baby out here.”

  With that, Meg had to agree. The change of scene, the change of air, the refreshing breeze that blew from the bay each night, had begun to work on them all. Byron had picked up some color in his cheeks, she awoke in the morning feeling more rested than she had in months, and Peter . . . Peter had started to look and act a little more like his old self again. The sling had been officially retired to the back of the dresser drawer; he drove the car to and from town without a moment's hesitation; his dissertation, he claimed, was coming along; and in bed he had made love to her, not as tenderly as he once had done . . . but at least, while he was awake.

  The running of the house had proved surprisingly easy. Leah—who lived, it turned out, in a small room in one of the back wings—consulted with Meg every morning about laundry, meals, and whatever else had to be done, and otherwise went about her business in an efficient and hardly noticeable way. She had an odd talent for turning up whenever or wherever she was needed, and being wholly absent the rest of the time, a knack she had inherited, it seemed, from her father.

  Once or twice, Nikos had popped in on their dinners, and he showed up around the grounds here and there doing nothing very useful, but he, too, was often nowhere to be found. It might have had something to do with Byron, Meg suspected. When they'd finally met each other, one evening by the fountain, they had seemed to instantly size each other up and not like what they'd found. Byron, she knew, considered Nikos a sort of exotic con man—"reminds me of a snake-oil salesman who used to court my Aunt Theodora in Georgia,” he confided—and Nikos appeared to regard Byron as an unwelcome intruder in his private domain. Meg and Peter he had to put up with, but not this other one, with the dog yet.

  When she got upstairs, Peter was bent over his typewriter. She looped her arms over his shoulders. “How's it coming?” she asked. There was a row of x’s typed right through the last paragraph on the page.

  “Slowly,” he said, flicking off the machine. He pushed his chair back from the desk, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It's funny, working without students barging in to ask for extensions on their term papers, or Fensterwald in the hall trying to coax somebody into going out with him.”

  “Funny good, or funny bad?”

  “Good, I guess. It's just that I get so absorbed I can completely lose track of time. There aren't any bells ringing, any departmental meetings, any exams to grade. I guess I never knew how much of a distraction those things were. Out here, everything seems so . . . suspended.” He swiveled in the chair to face Meg. “Don't you feel it, too? Like everything's operating on a different kind of time here?”

  “Arcadian mean time?” Meg joked.

  Peter tried to smile. “Maybe I'm just trying to come up with some excuse for moving so slowly with this dissertation . . . How's your studio working out?”

  “Pretty well,” Meg replied. “The electric wheel works okay. The light's good, now that I've attacked the windows. I'll need your help with the kiln, though—it's a little shaky on its foundation.”

  “Sure.”

  “In fact, I'm gonna run into town now for some supplies. Want to take a break?”

  “I better not.” He sighed. “I'll lose my latest epiphany. Why don't you get Byron to go with you?”

  Sometimes she felt Peter had invited Byron to Arcadia just to serve as his stand-in.

  “I will,” she said, brightly. “See you.” She heard his chair squeak as she left.

  Byron took her up on the offer instantly. He accompanied her downstairs, wearing a pair of baggy cut-offs and worn-out, ankle-high gym sneakers. Oh, By, Meg thought, one of these days we are gonna have to do something about your wardrobe.

  Dodger was peacefully snoozing in a shady corner of the front portico. “Don't wake him,” Byron cautioned. “If he sees us leaving, he'll think I'm abandoning him.” When Meg started the car, Diogenes raised his head, and Byron ducked his own out of sight. He popped up again only when they'd gone around a bend and were no longer visible from the house.

  In town, they found the Artworks Supply House off a quiet side street, behind the red brick post office. The window was filled with heavy, gaudy picture frames, a wooden easel, a display of various colored poster boards. A little buzzer sounded when they opened the door.

  Behind the counter, perched on a high stool, a young man with a close-cropped but fuzzy beard was measuring a print that refused to stay flat. When he looked up from his work, one end instantly rolled backwards across his hand.

  “I think I need a third hand,” he said.

  “Allow me,” said Byron, ambling up to the counter and pinning down one end.

  “I called a couple of days ago,” said Meg, “about some potting supplies—clay, a glazing brush, fettling knife.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, “I remember—that was me you talked to. I'm Larry Lazaroff. I own this joint. The last resort for every artist at this end of the island. Since I've never seen either of you before,” he said, including Byron in his glance, “I take it you're new out here.”

  “Two weeks old, now,” Meg replied. How should she put the rest? “We're staying in Passet Bay for the summer.”

  “Renting?” he said, rolling up the print again and tossing the ruler to one side. “Whose place?”

  Meg paused again. “One of the houses out on Huntington Road. Just for a few months.” She tried to sound offhand about it.

  “Huh—I didn't think any of those places were even rentable. Aren't that many to start with, and there's only one that's not occupied, as far as I know—and that's the Constantine place.” He saw a look pass between Meg and Byron. “You're not living out there, are you?” he said eagerly. “You're not"—and he snapped his fingers and pointed from one to the other—"the guys who inherited the joint? You aren't, like, his family, are you?” He seemed hardly able to contain his excitement.

  “My husband is,” Meg confessed, almost giving in to a laugh herself at Lazaroff's delight. “He's Mr. Constantine's grandson.”

  Lazaroff suddenly turned to Byron, pumped his hand, and said, “Congratulations, man—welcome to the neighborhood,” and Byron was already shaking back and thanking him before Meg could explain that Byron wasn't in fact her husband, but simply a friend staying with them. Lazaroff took it in for a second, then resumed pumping. “What the hell—more power to you. I've been a freeloader all my life.” He laughed, with the rat-a-tat of a machine gun.

  The buzzer went off again, and two women came in—middle-aged, both wearing big round sunglasses and summer jumpsuits a tad too small. Lazaroff greeted them as if he were welcoming guests to a p
arty. “You're not gonna believe this,” he announced to them, “but these people here"—indicating Meg and Byron—"are the new tenants of the Constantine place. This here is—”

  “Meg,” she dutifully supplied.

  “—and this is—”

  “Byron Blair.”

  The women swept their sunglasses back up onto their heads. One of them was a frosted blonde, the other a redhead.

  “I'm delighted to meet you,” said the blonde, extending a hand with long red-lacquered fingernails. “I'm Anita Simon—I live just down the road from you, a half mile or so—and this is my friend Betty Plettner.” Mrs. Plettner's earrings, large gold hoops, swung in greeting. “We've been wondering what would happen to the place. None of us knew if Mr. Constantine had any family or not.”

  Lazaroff leapt in to explain that Byron was just a house guest, and that Meg was the wife of the new owner.

  “How nice for you,” said Mrs. Simon. “I don't know the house well, of course, but from what I can remember, it was, well, I guess you'd really call it magnificent. Don't you think so, Betty?”

  “Oh, yes,” concurred Mrs. Plettner.

  “Just magnificent,” Mrs. Simon repeated. “How lucky you are.”

  Lazaroff had gone off into the back of the store, and returned with a huge oil painting—Meg recognized it as a Leroy Neiman—in a black metallic frame. “What do you think,” he asked, holding it up for Mrs. Simon's inspection. “Lovely,” she said. “You've done a lovely job with it.” Meg began to wonder if she'd ever be able to get her supplies and leave.

  “Wrap it up in something and I'll take it with me right now,” said Mrs. Simon. “The car's right outside. But listen,” she added, laying one hand lightly on Meg's wrist. “You and your husband, and of course Mr. Blair, too, you've all got to come to my party this Saturday night. Thirty Huntington Road. Eight o'clock. Don't eat all day. Wear whatever you like.” She seemed suddenly to take in Byron's shorts and dilapidated sneakers, and amended her suggestion to “Whatever you'd wear to a nice little summer party. You know.”

  Larry covered the painting—broad swatches of blue and green and yellow—in a sheet of brown paper, tied it with string, and carried it out to Mrs. Simon's car. “Right back,” he called, as the door swung shut behind him; Meg and Byron, left alone in the store, looked at each other as if they didn't know what had just hit them. Meg took her list from the pocket of her blouse and unfolded it. Byron said he was already beginning to feel underdressed for Passet Bay.

  Ten

  WHAT WAS REALLY driving Peter crazy was that old internal censor of his, that constant critic that took apart each of his sentences, each of his thoughts, as soon as he'd put it down on the page. It was like trying to write with Dunlop, the department chairman, sitting on his shoulder, chain-smoking and making nasty cracks. Nothing he did was quite good enough, nothing he wrote was as felicitously phrased as it should have been, no idea or opinion was really all that startling or original.

  Yes, what he'd said to Meg he still thought was true—the peace and tranquillity of Arcadia (the name still amused him) made it easier to concentrate, to work without interruption. But the silence around him, the absence of class bells and students in the hallway, had also made that inner voice just that much easier to hear. There was nothing to drown out the insidious dissenting, the carping that went on and on and on, and that left him wondering, in the solitude of the study, if he was really cut out for the career he had chosen. Or the career that, for want of any other particular ambition, had chosen him.

  Meg's faith in him made it even worse. It made him feel like a fraud. When she'd come into the study a few days before, to tell him about the party they were invited to that night, she'd asked him twice if she was interrupting his work; she treated his dissertation with a respect that he himself found it hard to give. He did want her respect, indeed he needed it if he was ever going to get anywhere in this business, but he wanted to feel he had legitimately earned it. Her blind faith was admirable, but it wasn't especially consoling. He wasn't quite sure what, if anything, he would ever find truly consoling.

  In the bedroom, he could hear Meg moving about, getting dressed for the party. He knew she was wondering if he was aware of the time. He turned off the power on the typewriter; without the monotonous hum of the motor, there was a sudden vacuum in the room. He opened the study door, and observed Meg in front of the bureau, pulling the white Mexican dress over her head. Her arms wriggled upwards toward the sleeve holes, and the blonde crest of her head appeared just above the top. With a shake, the dress fell, her arms sprouted like branches from a tree, and her head, with her hair flattened all around it as if she'd just come up from underwater, popped through. When she'd brushed the hair away from her eyes, she saw him leaning against the doorframe, wiping the lenses of his glasses on the tail of his shirt.

  “Did I steam up your glasses?” she joked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I had no idea there was a seven o'clock show.”

  “Well, please don't tell the neighbors.” “What will I tell the neighbors?” he said, stepping on the heels of his sneakers to remove them without untying the laces. “Who are these people we're going to see, anyway?” He kicked his shoes off, tossed his shirt onto the bed, and went into the bathroom to wash up. “We know anything at all about Mr. Simon?” he called through the open doorway.

  “Nope. Only that he likes his women, and his paintings, done in bold colors.”

  Peter laughed, above the splashing of the water. “I'm about to shave,” he admonished her. “Don't say anything to make me laugh.”

  “You shaved late this morning, didn't you?” she asked. “Now you've got to shave again?”

  “Seems so,” he said. “Must be the fresh air and sea breeze out here. Makes the whiskers grow.”

  Meg strapped on her new white sandals and hoped she'd managed the correct degree of dressiness, or perhaps informality, for the party. Not that she particularly cared how she and Peter—and Byron—went over on the Passet Bay cocktail circuit. She wanted to make a decent impression, that she'd admit, but the last thing she wanted was to be on everyone's guest list for the summer season. Peter had his dissertation to finish, she had her own work to do—the New York dealer had already sold three of her pieces—and more than anything else, she wanted their idyll in Arcadia to proceed as it had so far, with a minimum of distraction or interference.

  Peter put on a pair of chinos, some dark brown Topsiders, and a blue shirt and blazer. Meg told him he looked like a Yuppy poster.

  Byron, waiting for them in front of the house, was also wearing chinos, but he had on his brown tweed sport coat.

  “By,” Meg asked, before thinking, “aren't you going to faint in that jacket?”

  Byron looked embarrassed, as if he'd hoped they wouldn't notice what he had on. “I'm afraid I don't have a whole lot of choice,” he said. “I just tried on my alternate—the summer model—and it seems I forgot to have it cleaned. The last time I wore it, last summer, Dodger knocked a glass of beer off a picnic table and it landed all over it. I think I'm stuck with this one. Sorry.”

  “You could borrow one of mine,” Peter suggested.

  “And look like a scarecrow,” he replied, swinging his arms at his sides. “If you two just want to leave me home, I'll understand.”

  “No way,” Meg said, taking each of the men by one arm. “Tonight it's the Three Musketeers. All for one, and one for all.”

  The Simons lived just a couple of minutes away, on the other side of the road, in one of the modern glass and wood houses Meg and Peter had noticed on their first trip out. They left the car in a cleared patch, where other cars were already haphazardly parked, and approached the house like wary saboteurs. None of them was entirely sure where, among the jumble of rectangular boxes and decks of which the house was composed, the front door was located. From somewhere on the other side of the house they could hear music playing—something vaguely salsa—and then a voice, like a ship's ca
ptain calling from the quarterdeck, hailed them.

  “It's right under your nose,” and they looked up to see a man in a madras jacket, gesturing with a highball glass at a set of spiraling wooden stairs.

  “Thanks,” Peter replied, sheepishly, and they climbed the steps. At the top, the man introduced himself as Stanley Simon, their host, and when they explained who they were, he clapped Peter on the shoulder and said, “Right, right—my wife told me all about you. Glad you could make it. Come on around back—that's where all the action is.”

  The house was surrounded on all sides by the elevated wooden platform, but in back the deck extended out twenty-five or thirty feet. Here, there were strings of red and yellow paper lanterns swinging in the night air; a long, bountifully laden buffet table attended by a black woman in a starched white uniform; three or four smaller tables with canvas chairs and furled awnings. A couple of dozen people, all of them middle-aged or older, were laughing and talking, pointing at each other with toothpick hors d'oeuvres, rattling ice cubes in their glasses. The thickest concentration was at the bar table, where a black man also dressed in white served up the drinks with the efficiency and dispatch of a machine.

  “Welcome back to the old plantation,” Meg whispered in Byron's ear at precisely the same moment that Peter whispered in hers, “Nice to see things are so well integrated out here.”

  “What can I get you?” Simon asked. “There's nothing that O.P. here can't concoct—just name it.”

  Meg had a white wine spritzer, Byron and Peter gin and tonic. O.P. registered each of them, as he handed them their glasses, with a quick flick of his eyes, before removing himself again to the distant plane he appeared to inhabit. Meg felt something like talons encircling her elbow, and turned to find Mrs. Simon at her side.